Sturtevant: L’abécédaire de Deleuze
S is for Sturtevant, the Conceptual artist and postmodernist, whose replicas of works by leading figures of contemporary art challenged notions of
authorship and originality. Anticipating the mimetic images of the Pictures
generation, Sturtevant began her “repetitions” (she preferred the term to
“appropriations”) in the mid-1960s, re-creating works by her contemporaries, many of them male, from memory. Through painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and later video, Sturtevant’s reproductions undermined the institutional and material conditions of the modernist project by questioning the very process of creative expression.